


If I Ever Were to Leave

by CasmusRex



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bad Poetry, Dubious Philosophy, Gen, Metaphysical Sex, Pretension Beyond Reckoning, Rebirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26626972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CasmusRex/pseuds/CasmusRex
Summary: Tom Riddle's life has ended. It has also begun. An investigation into nonsense that makes sense in a purely semantic way.
Kudos: 2





	If I Ever Were to Leave

> If I ever were to leave,
> 
> would you notice me?
> 
> Or rest my bones in Earth
> 
> and weep with never knowing
> 
> what visions made my ken?

The world swam slowly, soft into a breaking light. Tom Riddle wracked his head for naught; he could not remember right. He remembered, first, a bracken green, a laugh, a split, a dark. "Did Harry live?" Tom mused alone, the echo sharp and stark. He looked around himself and found his manor, though gleaming white. "Impossible," Tom thought to himself. This was the afterlife.

Tom imagined the scene in the before. Celebrations upon celebrations. He was dead. After a moment's consideration, Tom wondered if there was anyone left who would need consolation in such an event. If, even after everything, there was a person who would wonder what had become of Tom Riddle. The child? Harry, perhaps, who was—as Tom could now freely admit without fear—more powerful than Tom had reckoned; and who was charmed with a weakening compassion for those who did not deserve it.

He, at least, would remember.

_Is my body buried now? Or did they incinerate me? What form do I have now? It cannot be material, for nothing can be transfigured from nothing. Even then, when I was formless, I took flight on the dust in the air, attached myself to the things which none can see. For what stuff is a soul but energy imparting motive to matter? A complex magic, but illusory. My will is nothing more than the crest upon the wave of my being._

Tom could now understand the severity of his mistake. Death was not final. A transmutation; but not an end. It was the earthly pleasures he craved now. Food and water and rest and the sustaining force that would carry him through. He could feel, now, the veil peering back, opening his senses to his wider surrounds.

> I could not help but wonder,
> 
> with my head beneath the pall,
> 
> what masters painted portraits.
> 
> What worlds the servants made.

Tom saw now the vast eternity, dimensionless to his sight; but proceeding like flicking through pages of a book. He saw the moment of his birth: that tragic wretch of a woman losing her will for base desire. He saw his life like the manifold reflections in a gem and he saw his death. He saw life known to no man. From the beginning to the ending of the world, Tom seeded himself in the universe, spread disc-like to feel every moment in every space. Until, at last, Tom gathered himself and sat in the place he knew was nowhere and contemplated.

> And if those worlds were ever such
> 
> as those I oft ignored,
> 
> would they, too, hold me lightly
> 
> or embrace me as their Lord?

Tom could feel his energy wink and dwindle past time. Tom considered that this moment, this eternity in a present, was not infinite. He knew that both time and no time had passed since his death and, at the boundary of this moment, he would exist both always and never. So he directed himself now, past the nothingness, to a moment in time in a place on Earth.

With his last measure, Tom entered Merope and—with motive force given only to the randomness of the universe—moved aside the membranous atoms of the ovum found there and made Tom begin again.


End file.
